Quotes from Gabriel Marcel

Music at times is more like perfume than mathematics.

The striking thing about the Precious Blood is the bond it establishes between love and suffering in our experience, a bond that has become so close that we have come to think of suffering accepted with joy as the most authentic sign of love with any depth at all.

The dynamic element in my philosophy, taken as a whole, can be seen as an obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction.

Contemplation and wisdom are highest achievements and man is not totally at home with them.

I almost think that hope is for the soul what breathing is for the living organism. Where hope is lacking the soul dries up and withers.

Hope consists in asserting that there is at the heart of being, beyond all data, beyond all inventories and all calculations, a mysterious principle which is in connivance with me

... freedom is a conquest, always partial, always precarious, always challenged. ... the freest person is the one with the most hope.

But a science is exact to the extent that its method measures up to and is adequate to its object.

Metaphysics is a science.

But however measurable, there is much more life in music than mathematics or logic ever dreamed of.

It is right that we be concerned with the scientific probity of metaphysics.

I almost think that hope is for the soul what breathing is for the living organism. Where hope is lacking the soul dries up and withers...

The atheist relies not on an experience but on an idea, or pseudo idea, of God: if God existed, He would have such and such characteristics; but if he had such characteristics, He could not allow etc...His judgment of incompability, in fact, is based on a judgment of implications.

My freedom is not and cannot be something that I observe as I observe an outward fact; rather it must be something that I decide, moreover, without appeal. It is beyond the power of anyone to reject the decision by which I assert my freedom and this assertion is ultimately bound up with the consciousness that I have of myself.

The wise man knows how to run his life so that contemplation is possible.

We must, therefore, break away once and for all from the metaphors which depict consciousness as a luminous circle round which there is nothing, to its own eyes, but darkness. On the contrary, the shadow is at the centre.

It is impossible to exaggerate how much better the formula es denkt in mir is than cogito ergo sum, which lets us in for pure subjectivism.

The obscurity of the external world is a function of my own obscurity to myself; the world has no intrinsic obscurity. Should we say that it comes to the same thing in the end? We must ask up to what point this interior opacity is a result; is it not very largely the consequence of an act? and is not this act simply sin?

I cannot help recording that this illumination of my thought is for me only the extension of the Other, the only Light. I have never known such happiness. I have been playing Brahms for a long time, piano sonatas that were new to me. They will always remind me of this unforgettable time. How can I keep this feeling of being entered, of being absolutely safe—and also of being enfolded?

Je ne peux rien affirmer de moi-même qui soit authentiquement moi-même.

March 7th It is a serious error, if I am not mistaken, to treat time as a mode of apprehension. For one is then forced to consider it also as the order according to which the subject apprehends himself, and he can only do this by breaking away from himself, as it were, and mentally severing the fundamental engagement which makes him what he is.

The detachment of the saint springs, as one might say, from the very core of reality; it completely excludes curiosity about the universe. This detachment is the highest form of participation. The detachment of the spectator is just the opposite, it is desertion, not only in thought but in act.

I know by my own experience how, from a stranger met by chance, there may come an irresistible appeal which overturns the habitual perspectives just as a gust of wind might tumble down the panels of a stage set - what had seemed near becomes infinitely remote and what had seemed distant seems to be close.

the freedom of a people or a country be defined as absolute independence, is it not obvious that in a world like ours freedom cannot exist, not only because of inevitable economic interdependences, but because of the part played by pressure, or, less politely, by blackmail, at all levels of international intercourse?